When is an exhibition not an exhibition? That’s the question that seemed to hang in the air Wednesday morning as the Royal Ontario Museum launched, with great ceremony, The Forbidden City: Inside the Court of China’s Emperors in its central hall. The parade of politicians and dignitaries — Premier Kathleen Wynne, Minister of Culture Michael Chan, China’s ambassador to Canada, among others — took more than an hour to run through, waxing at length on the importance of exchange, both cultural and economic.

It seemed clear, at least in that moment, that The Forbidden City is as much a diplomatic mission as a display of rare and beautiful objects (which it is).

It’s naive, of course, to think culture is ever merely an aesthetic concern, and the tidy, often gorgeous objects arrayed in the ROM’s basement carry heavy freight. Chinese ambassador Zhang Junsai made polite reference in his speech to the West and China having “different values. . . . Only by understanding those differences can we create a harmonious world.” A noble goal, no doubt, arrived at — or strived for — by radically different means.

You can bet no such diplomatic entourage, preaching the benefit of “cultural exchange,” turned up at the opening of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s recent exhibition of celebrated Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei. This glaring contrast casts a shadow deeper than those to be found in the ROM’s basement, where China’s Imperial treasures are on display.

Let’s be clear: The Forbidden City, the aptly named, sprawling palace complex in central Beijing that served as home to China’s emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties, is undeniably one of the world’s most spectacular sites, stuffed with significant and beautiful objects that help tell the story of one of the world’s great civilizations.

The ROM has imported 250 of them here, with the help of Beijing’s Palace Museum, in its centennial year to help tell a part of its own story, too. In the early part of the last century — not coincidentally, shortly after the last emperor abdicated and republicanism took over — the ROM became the happy recipient of trove after trove of remarkable Chinese antiquities through its connections with a British dealer there, George Crofts.

The ROM’s Chinese collection is perhaps its crown jewel, standing among the world’s best outside of China itself, and The Forbidden City is the proverbial no-brainer as an opportunity to celebrate its own rich history.

Yet the ROM’s own collection, spanning centuries and arrayed above-ground in a glorious day-lit setting, outshines these high-profile borrowings.

To be fair, The Forbidden City offers exquisite things, most of them ink-on-silk paintings of palace life: Emperor Qianlong Hunting a Hare is a precisely rendered scene, made with remarkable skill; or the exceptional 12 Beauties, belonging to Prince Yinzhen (later Emperor Yongzheng), a sensitive, artsy sort who felt overburdened by his kingly duties.

But largely, the show feels simplistic and sparse, like a junior high school textbook skimming the surface of a complex Imperial history that ended in disaster. It shows remarkable objects, like ceremonial vases and cups, a suit of gilded armour, and a silken dog’s costume; it uses twee shadow-puppet animation to try to reanimate palace life which, at best, feels cloying.

And it quietly omits the enormous social impact China has had, here and elsewhere. The dying days of 2,000 years of Imperial rule, which ended with the 1911 revolution and touched off a diaspora that scattered millions of Chinese across the globe — 20 percent of them, by some guesses, right here to Canada — appears almost as a footnote: A single sentence about Puyi, the so-called “last emperor,” who abdicated in 1912 because of it.

In this era, in this city, with the descendants of that diaspora among the leaders of our community, surely we can do more. The Forbidden City is here for six months, until September. The ROM, with its excellent, inclusive public programming — not to mention a stated intent of being that all-important cross-cultural conversational hub — has the means. Here’s hoping it has the will.

The Forbidden City: Inside the Court’s of China’s Emperors opens Saturday, March 8 and continues to Sept. 1.

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